[GRLUG] Itunes and France

[Ron Lauzon]

Bob Kline wrote:
> I think France has this basically right in principle. Knowingly or not, it is fighting for standards, and we mostly know how important those are, and
> what the PC world was like just 15 years, when almost everything was proprietary, and expensive.
>   
Many groups are (finally!) discovering what many of us have known for a 
long time: Proprietary is bad for the consumer.
And they are discovering what "proprietary" really means.

For example, the big push to use the Open Document Format instead of 
Microsoft Word.

Back in the '80s, the saying was "No one ever got fired for going with 
IBM."  By the mid 1990s, that was no longer said.  Now the saying is "No 
one ever got fired for going with Microsoft" but that is now just 
starting to be false.

> The only way to beat all this is with standards.  You
> either have standards or you get monopolies.
And companies (like Microsoft and Apple) who have business models based 
not on providing the best value, but rather on DRM and customer lock-in, 
want to either own these "standards" or cry foul when their proprietary 
standards become de facto standards and they are called to open them up.

-- 
Ron Lauzon - rlauzon at acm dot org
   Homepage: http://7lauzon.home.comcast.net/
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